Isabelle led me to a small, diagonal town.
Not like the city, which is straight up and down,
but with roads that slanted
and old houses that leaned into the years
as if planted
in a gale, and at an angle.
I'd followed breadcrumbs to the door of the shop
on top of the hill.
And well, yes, almost from the jangle
we knew each other, not quite straight away
but from what we'd written, what we'd read.
Isabelle is beautiful, by the way,
the mermaid of her paintings,
although she blushed to hear it said.
And I was simply me. She made tea, and sat on stairs with girlish glee.
I stood. We talked, sealed in our bubble, no customers came to disturb us.
Everything in the shop held a story.
I chose, Isabelle explaining what each means:
Strangely calculating machines;
deliberately crafted items with no obvious purpose;
boards, counters, rules of ancient games.
Then we played turns with the new, unwielded power
of telling our *real* names.
She showed me up steep steps from a crooked landing,
to a small stooped room at the top, where we
peered out a window from a sloping roof
over the fields where a cow and a horse
keep an old man. Standing
on a tiny stool, to make her tall as me.
And if I needed proof,
there were hedges at forty-five degrees
to the grass or thereabouts,
and again, to the trees
Back in the shop,
We saw there was no plan to what
had survived, and what had not.
And what will be left - we wondered - a billion years gone.
We left ourselves unexamined, the two things whose story we did not explore.
But agreed there would be more
time to skim those chapters.
Which was as well, since the sun's
had turned another day.
It looked like rain, a taxi and a train.
And that was what I left - dear Isabelle,
in her story-shop upon the crown
of that half-discovered, half-remembered, diagonal town.